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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

How Americans Reshaped Israeli Judaism Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi Identity/Crisis listeners. As we approach the end of this calendar year, I want to thank you for your loyalty and for being part of Identity/Crisis. This was a powerful year for this podcast amidst such difficult times for our people. We recorded 49 episodes, including two live events, we doubled our listeners, and we became the most-listened-to podcasts for over a thousand people. I heard from so many of you that these conversations were grounding and essential for you in thinking through the big issues of the day. I’m grateful for all your support. 

And I’d like to ask you to consider also supporting this podcast with a year-end gift to the Shalom Hartman Institute. This podcast is a small piece of what we are trying to do for the Jewish people and for the state of Israel, which is to lead with ideas amidst a moment of tremendous uncertainty. Your support enables us to grow this podcast, to launch new podcasts like our recently released Thoughts and Prayers, and enables us to invest in the many programs, initiatives, and people of the Shalom Hartman Institute, all of whom are improving Jewish lives and communities. And your support would mean a lot to me. You can make your gift at shalomhartman.org/give. Again, shalomhartman.org/give. Thank you again for being part of this awesome Identity/Crisis community.

Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on December 15th, 2025. 

So here at Hartman we think a lot about what makes ideas sticky. How in the business of research and education, you can develop the kinds of ideas that stick around in people’s heads long enough to influence them in the world, what strategies you need to employ in the business of persuasion, and particularly persuasion for the long run.

Liberals like me want to believe, naively, in a marketplace of ideas. We wish for a world in which we are all capable of assimilating information in ways that are ethically sourced, and then to turn them over and debate them with others, and that ultimately to believe that the best ones are gonna win the day. We wish for a world of Aristotle’s rhetoric where some perfect alignment of the speaker’s content, character, and skills of persuasion will shape the ideas that will ultimately define a society. 

That belief, of course, is not real life. We come to understand more and more the tragic reality in our world of algorithms and strategic disinformation and artificial intelligence, that persuasion is more often than not about trickery and populism and fear and manipulation. I find the more I believe this about others, the reason I think they come to such bad conclusions, I should probably interrogate my own biases as well and burrow out all the ways I may too have been under the sway of false stratums and deceptions. 

But the problem is deeper than that. An honest reckoning in human history would probably show that the most common ways in which ideas moved across civilizations was with some amount of violence and coercion.

There’s a quote out there, sometimes attributed to Bishop Desmond Tutu, but I think it’s more accurately from Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, when he said, when the missionaries came to Africa, “They had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.’

Persuasion between equals is optimistic and ideal, but hard to achieve. Persuasion by force comes easier, especially to the persuader, and colonialism was never merely an economic process. It was a way in which the powerful used violence and seizure of assets and land and the imposition of self onto others. The ravaging entailed also this business of implanting ideas, this illicit, deeply imperfect exercise of persuasion. 

I’m sure at this point that my guest is wondering why I am talking about all of this as a means of introducing today’s conversation. My guest today is Adam Ferziger, an intellectual and social historian whose research focuses on Jewish religious movements and religious responses to secularization and assimilation. He’s a chair in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar Ilan University. Most importantly for today’s purposes, he’s the author of a new book entitled Agents of Change: American Jews and the Transformation of Israeli Judaism. 

The book tells the story of the evolution and emergence of an Israeli moderate Orthodoxy, and to some degree a broader, moderate Judaism in Israel that he sees as connected to the immigration of a number of key rabbinic and educational figures who came from America to Israel, folks like Rabbis Aharon Lichtenstein, David Hartman, Chaim Brovender, Rabbanit  Chana Henkin, Malke Bina, and others. And then all the contours of today’s Israeli moderate orthodoxy that emerged as a result.

And this is why I started on this thought experiment about colonialism. As a liberal American Jew, I found myself, in reading the book, very affected by this phenomenon that I was once unconsciously a part of, a student of some of these people, and now something I’m professionally committed to. 

As an American Jew and Zionist who believes that the ideas of liberal Judaism forged in liberal America are essential to the future moral and spiritual thriving of Israeli Judaism, I was elated to think about the success that Ferziger describes of the ways these imports and immigrants shaped the culture. And I also recognized, honestly, if unsympathetically, why these same ideas and people are often still met in parts of Israeli society with anger and resentment, why they continue to be characterized as agents of foreign influence, non-natives who must be repudiated.

This past week, in fact, Avi Maoz, a right-wing religious fundamentalist politician, a political party of one legislator in the Israeli Knesset launched a campaign publicly against a whole set of organizations in Israel, including the Hartman Institute, among others, who he accused of undermining Zionist and Jewish values in Israel. His campaign included a hotline for people to call to report on our transgressions. 

Now we have no shame institutionally of being on Maoz’s list. Honestly, it’s a badge of honor, but it reawakens that false notion that there’s something outside-ery, something imported, something non-native about the values that we teach in Israel. And the really sad thing is that non-prominent people might arrive to the inevitable conclusion of this kind of thinking, which is that liberal and pluralistic values are anathema to Zionism and to Jewish values. Such thinking would confirm exactly what so many enemies of Jews in the West now already think about us.

The last thing I’ll say is that to all of you authors out there, as a general rule, if you write a book and say awfully nice things about me, I might just invite you onto this podcast. That’s definitely the case with this week’s guest, and thank you for doing so. But it also happens that the book itself, the story it tells, the questions it raises, sit exactly at the threshold of so many of our concerns here at the Institute as well as of this podcast, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to confront them today.

Adam, thanks for being on the show this morning. 

Adam: Thank you Yehuda, and thank you for what you’re doing. Honestly, everything that I said there—and there is some critical analysis as well—is, is really how I, I called it how I saw it. 

Yehuda: You know, most people will not have read the book yet. Hopefully they will after this conversation. So maybe for the purposes of just getting us started, you know, I listed a handful of the people who immigrated to Israel mostly, I think between the seventies and eighties and it would be useful to just frame two issues. 

One is what do you think motivates the arrival of this particular generation of immigrants to Israel—why they come? I’m sure they have all different personal and familiar reasons, but it is noticeable in reading your book that it appears to be a kind of big phenomenon. And the second is, just give us a kind of summary of a couple of the key issues and ideas that you think that the leaders that you’re talking about bring into Israeli society. And then we can unpack pieces of that. 

Adam: Okay. Thank you. So regarding the first issue, the time framing that I gave was 1965 to 1983, which covers these eight people. We mentioned some of them, I can mention some of them more. But really in a way, I’m, I’m an historian by training and it was really looking backwards. I arrived in Israel in 1987, actually arrived there in 1982 as a gap year student, spent two years, went back to the States and then ’87. And really the education that I’ve received in America, the background, some of the key people who influenced me were an anathema in Israel, and I felt very much that I was identified, connected, but on the other side, kind of an outsider myself.

And somehow around the 21st century, it started to change. Now, part of that is my own acculturation and having children growing up in Israel and being Israelis as opposed to immigrants, children of immigrants. 

But the other part was that I started to see that ideas that I resonated with were much more mainstream. They weren’t dominant, and I wanna make that clear. I’m not talking about something that is. Transformed the sense that it has reversed or has undermined Avi Maozs or all sorts of other examples of that. But nonetheless, it’s a very major voice and it has a place, Hartman and many other things that are within that spectrum of what I call ISMO, Israeli moderate Orthodoxy.

In research we say, what was the she’eilat mechkar, what was the research question here? And the research question was how did that happen historically? And that’s what took me back to processes. And one of the things that I liked about your introduction, I liked a lot of things. I didn’t really get the colonialism, but I liked the other pieces.

Yehuda: Classic Israeli, doesn’t like the colonialism, but yeah. 

Adam: Great. I made it. See that? I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m an Israeli now. 

Yehuda: Yeah, you did. Yep. 

Adam: So that… it’s about education. And that’s really what the story is about. People who, who got there and were looked at as martians, they were looked at as out, even deviance. And why did they come? Cause they were religious Zionists and because there was this moment, a lot of it around the sixties and a, a youth sensing that they wanted to change the world. You know, the times there are a change in the Israeli context. 

A lot of these people were involved in the Soviet Jewry movement. A lot of these people were post-Holocaust sort of children or people who were that generation, the ’67 war, and they really saw Israel as the great experiment in Jewish history, and they wanted to be a part of it. 

By that time, kind of American Jewry had established itself enough that there was a census, always more to do in America, but nonetheless, there’s sort of a little bit of a plateau maybe in certain ways, and Israel is sort of the new frontier.

But again, when they got there, they weren’t greeted so nicely. David Harvey wasn’t greeted so nicely. Neither was Aharon Lichtenstein and many of these people. And, and the story—and then I, I’d love to hear your, your response—is, is a story of people starting advanced educational institutions that, rather than just teaching gap year kids who came for the year and then sending them back, actually channeling their efforts towards attracting Israelis. The beginning, very few, and as time progressed, more and more Israelis saying, hey, this is interesting. 

And so the story, and this is really my last line before returning to you, that the process is, in the 2000s, these Israelis come of age and they become the top educators. They become, the, the movers and shakers. And that is why the transformation takes about 30 years or 40 years from the original arrivals until it starts to really show face within Israeli society. 

Yehuda: So I actually, I have witnessed the kind of tail end of this at the Hartman Institute over the past 15 years, which is when I came on in 2010, there was still a little bit of mythology hanging around that Hartman was like an American outpost, American-Canadian, actually, outpost in Jerusalem, and that the idiom was English, the idiom was something diasporic. 

That is totally gone in the institute today because, you know, the faculty who teaches at Hartman are overwhelmingly at this point, native born Israelis, which was not the case 30 to 40 years ago when the Institute got started. There was just generational change that just happened kind of naturally.

I know that it’s a little bit of some and a little bit of the other, but I’m wondering whether that is just having children, or, in other words, how much of this is about something more than, if you stick around long enough and have children, they will wind up speaking—and students—they will wind up speaking this language.

And as a corollary to that, I’m wondering in your mind, how much of the success of this enterprise, and you said it’s still limited, but how much of the success of this enterprise is charismatic individuals and how much of it is the success of an important set of ideas that were able to take root in spite of the fact that they were kind of born imports?

Adam: I wanna clarify, and this goes back to your introduction as well. I didn’t just say it was a 30 year delay. The key analytical moment in the book is that there was a transnational event, which takes place and a transnational event, according to, I used a scholar by the name of Van Elteren. I discovered that he sort of gave support to the interpretation that I’d seen, and I thought he sharpened it very nicely for me, Mel Van Elteren, is that when an idea moves from a place to another place, it’s not static, it doesn’t stay the same. It evolves. And what was transformative about these students is not just that they repeated what their teachers and rabbis said is that they processed it, they recalibrated, they Israel it.

So speaking exactly to what you’re talking about, of course children and generational and time and all that stuff. But I think it’s much more than that. I think that what we’re talking about, and that’s why I was particular in this sort of nitpicky, academic way of not calling it Israeli Modern Orthodoxy or something like that. It’s moderate. I use the term Orthodoxy, which is, you know, maybe could look at in different ways, but it’s different, it’s Israeli. And the Israeliness of it is so important. It’s important, on one hand, to understand why this was successful and why these ideas are particular to the sovereign environment that has evolved over the last 75, 76 years.

It’s also important to be completely intellectually honest because pieces of that Israeliness are hard for people who are not Israelis to relate to. And there’s an ambivalence and a complexity to it that we should be aware of. It shouldn’t stop people from communicating, but it should make people honest about it.

Yehuda: So give us one example of that, of an American Jewish idea connected to an American—one of these American Jewish Immigrants that get Israelified in ways that make sense when you understand it in its own kind of cultural and linguistic context, but may wind up then becoming slightly unrecognizable to those who are back in the home country.

Adam: I don’t know about the linguistics, but I’ll just say like, there’s no question that issues of gender, issues of women’s involvement in traditional Jewish life, you can do what I call historical archeology. You can always find somebody who said something in the, even in the 17th century Renaissance, there are all sorts of people say funny, interesting things, and sometimes people like, dig them up and say, oh, you see this isn’t new.

As a historian, I find that a little bit weak. You get what I’m talking about. You, you see it all over the place. But there’s no question that American Jewry, because of denominational issues, because of the feminist movement, because of all sorts of things, was much more on top or aware or conscious or sensitive to the questions revolving around the role of women, gender in general, within religious life, within religious, educational life, et cetera, before Israel and that there were critical figures, males and females, who were sensitive to those issues and came to Israel and demonstrated greater openness or were proactive about these things. 

But if you look at it today, Israelis are more radical than Americans in many contexts, you know? You don’t really have the denominational framework that you have in America. You have denominational representations. They’re much less pronounced and influential than in the North American context.

But the Israeli traditionalist spectrum, when it comes to roles for women, when it comes to issues of LGBTQs, when all sorts of things that sort of were, you could say imported or were transferred, they have recalibrated them and for a bunch of reasons that we can talk about, I think that they’ve taken the next step and, and the last part of the book is about sort of the boomerang effect is how some of the things that derive from the American setting then they were recalibrated in Israel eventually make their way back to the North American setting and have interesting interactions within that context. So I think that the issues of gender and women’s roles in religious life is probably a great example. 

Yehuda: Yeah. Now I’ll come back to the switch from import to export later on in our conversation. I’ll give you a profound example of this actually, of what you’re describing is, you know, the places where I like to pray are basically traditional or Halakhic egalitarian environments, and it was maybe two years ago or so, I was at a bar mitzvah in Jerusalem at one of the kind of Orthodox egalitarian minyanim in Jerusalem and it, and it was 200 people there, and it was just exploding and beautiful and also so deeply fluent, which is one of the things that non-Orthodox Judaism kind of struggles with is collective shared fluency, and it’s not fluent for obvious reasons. 

And one of my friends who now lives there said, yeah, I think the future of this kind of egalitarian Judaism is actually here. It’s kind of a mind blowing type of thing because non-Orthodox Jews have been saying for decades, like my Judaism is not present here. And actually for many non-Orthodox Jews, if they walked into that environment, it would code to them as being a purely Orthodox framework. There was so much that they don’t understand. There’s no signposting in terms of like, page numbers. It’s very different culturally and stylistically. It’s a weird thing. It’s so clearly an import of North American Judaism into Israel, but it’s been translated into a version that perpetuates the alienation of American Jews in Israel.

Adam: So I, I love this point, and I, I just wanna expand a little bit, and this is a little bit, you know, kind of academic, but I think it is interesting. 

Yehuda: Yeah, go for it. 

Adam: It’s insightful and, so, I thought a lot about this and you know, the assumption, and it’s really part of the assumption, a lot of the debates and a lot of the discomfort of non-Orthodox Jews with Israel is that Israeli religion is shaped by two things: The chief rabbi and the Haredi politicians, they sort of set the tone and everybody can sort of, is always looking over their back at those things, or they just have to follow the rules. And since the chief rabbinate, it’s a state-based religion, a state sponsored religious environment, and they fund all sorts of things, that’s where it’s at.

So there’s some truth to that, but much less than I originally thought, than most of us think, in one way. So on certain issues, and I wanna be absolutely clear, these are extraordinarily existential personal issues like conversion, like status, like the who’s a rabbi, like who can perform certain activities, issues to do with personal status, et cetera, and a few others about the public space. There’s no question that the rabbinate and political sort of things impact those spaces. 

But when it comes to the communal frame, nothing, it’s really the Wild West, and it’s the exact opposite in America. In America, this separation of the church and state, and you’re not allowed to use state funding for most religious activities, but certainly denominational frameworks, it’s very crucial to them to be a part of associations, a part of the Rabbinical Assembly, part of the UAHC, OU, et cetera, Reconstruction frameworks, because of camaraderie, because of support, because of training, because of the pipeline that’s talked about a lot. And those so-called voluntary associations have strict rules. 

I mean, the discussion today, and, I wrote a textbook about Jewish denominations that’s used in the Melton School. So I’ve really spent a lot of time trying to think about that as a sort of insider outsider on the other side of the pond as, as a former American resident who’s, who’s very much sympathetic. And it’s still on the books: A Conservative rabbi, if they perform an intermarriage, cannot be a member of the Rabbinical Assembly. Now, think about all sorts of things that go on in the synagogue and how that body affects it, or who can be a graduate.

In Israel, none of that exists. A synagogue is a framework where Jews get together and they decide what they wanna do, and that, I think, speaks to what you were talking about before, Yehuda, about the sense of sort of sui generis creativity that can go on in those synagogues, which is, yes, far into the American formalistic kind of context. 

I’ll just say one more anecdote if I may. I remember, yeah. I was very close. I had the great privilege of—this is gonna sound funny—a million people think they were very close with David Ellenson. David Ellenson was a great, great man. The former—

Yehuda: Yeah, me too.

Adam: Leader of HUC. But I, I had, we used to eat shakshuka together a lot. It was fun. And I remember I came to a graduation of the HUC in Israel for their rabbinic class, and David Ellenson got up and he said, you know, who’s the most influential Reform rabbi in America, North America? And everyone’s looking and you know, who’s he gonna say? And they started to think. He goes, Levi Kelman. Now Levi Kelman is a great rabbi. He’s a rabbi of a synagogue in Baka, not far from where I live. He was, I think he retired now. And he said, you know why? Because all of our students spend a year in Israel and they look for a synagogue to pray, and they go to Levi’s synagogue.

And in those days, Levi was sitting on the floor playing guitar in the middle of services or making a very informal kind of service. And then they go back to their synagogues, they look at what’s going on in America, and we all know that North American services have become more chavurah oriented, less formal, et cetera. So his claim was that Levi was impacting American society through his synagogue in new ways. So because Levi could do what he wanted, Levi didn’t have to account to, to any sort of more formal or associational framework. So that’s that piece. 

Yehuda: So I’m gonna challenge you on this a little bit. 

Adam: Perfect. 

Yehuda: Which is that I think increasingly this is a dated dichotomy, and maybe that’s actually part of the proof of the whole concept of your book, but I think that dichotomy is increasingly dated. I’ll give you an example to this effect. So about 15 or so years ago, a handful of rabbis, including some of my colleagues at Hartman, visited New York and went to synagogue services at Bnai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side. These are famously magnificent Friday night services. The music is beautiful, the instruments, the creativity, there’s a whole liturgical thing going on, of the integration of Sephardic piyuttim with the Ashkenazi liturgy. It’s just a beautiful thing. Very accessible actually, but beautiful and accessible. So they came and they were like, their mind was blown by these tefillot. 

So they go back to Israel and they started as one of the takeaways, what’s known as Beit Tefillah Yisraelit which is the services that is actually a synagogue in Tel Aviv, but it’s most famous for the services that they do on the Tel Aviv port outside during the summer, sometimes up to 1500 people are out there, some of whom are like regulars, many of them are people who are like. On the beach and they’re like, oh, that sounds nice. Let me go sit there. 

It’s a beautiful representation of the kind of public square Judaism that you can do in Israel, in part because it’s a Jewish country that would be very hard to execute here in America. So there, the dichotomy that you’re describing is kind of like private Judaism in America and a kind of public Judaism in Israel.

And I, I was there, this is, I’m not making this up. I was standing there five or so years ago, a little longer ago with a group of American rabbis who were studying at Hartman for the summer, and we were in Tel Aviv for Shabbat and standing there at the tefillot and I heard one of them say to the other, “This is amazing, we should bring it back to America.”

And I was like, guys, this came from America. This is American. And you’re probably not gonna be able to pull it off in Central Park. You could probably bring back dimensions of it, but it got translated into something different. 

And the reason I’m raising this as a challenge is that I actually think increasingly the story is that American Jews are behaving Jewishly more like Israelis—Interested in breaching the dynamic between public square and private institutions, challenging the hegemony of associations and religious institutions, more and more Reform and Conservative synagogues are disaffiliating for the movement, precisely because they want the freedom to be able to do what they want to do.

And in contrast, Israelis are privatizing religion more. More and more Israelis seek out religion outside of the framework of the chief rabbinate and so forth. So something feels messier about the fact that American Judaism, to me, is becoming a little bit more Israeli and Israeli Judaism is becoming a little bit more American.

Adam: So thank you and I appreciate the challenge. And it’s, it’s really a conversation more than a challenge from my perspective. A few things. 

First of all, this is totally out of context. You said public square and you, you said the date at the beginning, and we’re, we’re here the day after 15 people were murdered in public square. I’ve been to Bondi Beach in the beautiful place in Sydney, and I just wanna say that that is like a, just that imagery of praying or lighting Hanukkah candles in a public square, in a diaspora community that I’ve been to that is so established and so-called safe. It’s just, just horrifying to me. And I, okay. But I, I just, you know, my association.

Getting back, a, a very sharp move back. So. I actually think we’ll start with the Israeli parts. I don’t, I don’t think, I think Israeli private-public is so interesting and it goes in different ways, and I think there is an increasing sense that the private is a place for personal expression. It’s part of a certain individualism that Israeli society has sort of evolved over the years. But public Judaism is so much a part of Israel and it, it just goes in a bunch of ways. Or, I mean, just like the sort of very amami, sort of popular way is when you go to a soccer game during Aseret Yemei Teshuva, during the, the days of repentance between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and during halftime, they start singing slichot, they start singing the piyyutim, and people who are not wearing kippot, who are, do not look at all, they look like, not soccer hoodlums, but they look kind of, not that, you know. 

Yehuda: They’re people. 

Adam: Yeah. People. So I think that those kind of things are, are very Israeli. I agree with you though, about America. Although, you know, I’m gonna push back at you. I think you’re one of the people who are pushing the hardest for this. I think that’s the Shalom Hartman Institute’s success, which is remarkable since over the last couple of years, and, you know, I keep an eye on it, is in part, speaking to those people who, you know, my, my, our friend from Stanford, Ari Kelman, you know, called them “uns,” you know, unaffiliated, but it turns out “uns” can be very engaged Jewishly, and maybe they’re looking for new ways and maybe it’s generational and you know, you guys are pushing that. I think Hadar in other ways is doing the same thing. DC Minyan, all those kinds of things are part of that. 

But here I go back to, it’s telling, it’s in the book, you know, Tamar Ross wrote very much about the idea that it’s still, it’s within your, for the most part, your private sphere. It’s not the public space. I don’t think that these amazing phenomenon and creative kinds of non-denominational, post-denominational learning experiential things that are going on, you know, Moishe Houses, all these things, but there’s still really sort of privatized, individual, entrepreneurial events, which are profound and impactful, but I think that they’re really of a different nature than the the public space in the, in the Israeli context. 

Yehuda: Yeah. It would need a different book, which is about Chabad, because Chabad is kind of poking holes in all of these things because they’ve totally changed the norms of public and private for the Jewish people.

Adam: So if you recall, actually I have one chapter about Beit Daniel, about the Reform Synagogue center in North Tel Aviv, and one of the pieces there is a little bit of some analysis, ’cause they have a pay per service rather than membership as one option for how you relate to the synagogue. And it’s clearly a Chabad model and for their gan, for their Kindergarten, for their bar mitzvah programs, for their conversion programs.

And yeah, Chabad is so innovative. I’m going to Thailand in a couple weeks and I’m gonna be spending some time looking at Chabad and looking at Israelis in Thailand and how that goes. It was very interesting, Yehuda, for me to hear you say that because you, as a person who is really sort of an architect or someone who thinks a lot about the macro and how things are evolving, like many people I talk to, like you, looking at Chabad is really helpful because they are, not to copy, but just to think about their insights and thinking how that is relevant or irrelevant to the non-Chabad or non-Messianist or non-Orthodox environment.

I do wanna plug for a second, and you know, my book describes people who would be self-described as Orthodox, but in the last chapter, I really did make a very strong case. I think that American Jews of all orientations and attitudes who want to have a conversation with Israelis, I think could benefit from being aware of the group that I’m talking about. And I think that there is room for more conversation than exists today. 

Yehuda: A hundred percent. Yeah. I’m, I’m tempted to just riff with you on Chabad. I have a whole theory that Chabad can be best understood as the first American denomination. And in some ways, they understood America totally differently than the European imports. By the way, that’s the prehistory, right, of the importing of European Judaism to America? So let’s talk about success and failure, right?

Reading your book, you’re obviously gonna lift up the ways in which you see the markers of influence and the places of success. In the meantime, you know, I remember a conversation in my office a handful of years ago with a very prominent Hartman donor, somebody who had been with us for a long time, who basically was sitting in my office and was in tears because he said, we’ve been trying so hard to advance the cause of pluralism in Israel, and it feels like it’s moving backwards. We lost. 

And you know, it’s only mild consolation to say to him, can you imagine how bad it would be if we hadn’t even tried? Right. That doesn’t really work. But I’m wondering, you know, and you’re a historian, it’s not your job to kind of call balls and strikes, to referee what succeeded and what failed. But how do we think about the relative success and failure? Because we’re also dealing with what feels like a very significant pushback against liberal values in Israel. How successful has the project of the importing of what you call moderate values been into Israeli society and how would we even come up with a formula to understand it? 

Adam: So I think pushback is a good litmus test for success. Just, you know, just have put that on the table. So I’ll tell my little story. My wife and I made aliyah, we moved to Israel when we were 22. We’ve been living there for 38 years and I was in Yeshivat Har Etzion, Gush, where one of the key figures, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein led the yeshiva. I think you might have attended there as well. 

Yehuda: I did, yeah. 

Adam: And it was Yom Kippur and we’re walking back from Kol Nidre services and I saw the other leader, Rav Amital walking with one of the other figures in, in the book, in Agents of Change, Daniel Tropper, who in like 1969, creates this organization called Gesher to create conversation between secular and religious Israelis. Those are bad terms, but we’re using them. 

And I was chutzpadik enough to say to Danny, I said, how does it feel in 1987, 20 whatever, almost 20 years after you started this organization and the secular religious divide is getting worse and worse. It sort of, you know, parallels what this philanthropist said to you.

So actually, I think my book kind of made me feel differently about this because I think that this book is about not being presentist. And being educators, being institution builders, being people who actually see strength and value in texts, in ideas, in processing. I think really that’s about not being presentists. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have values, it doesn’t mean you don’t speak out when there are issues which are, are troubling and you don’t try to impact them. But the idea is that things have a gestation period. They will never come out—like children, right?—the way you wanted them to, but they will come, it turns out that they actually do internalize what you say. 

So in terms of success and failure, I think that there are some interesting things. So one chapter in the book, I think it’s an interesting sort of perspective, is a couple years ago I noticed that the most popular author in Israel is a guy from England, a very profound man from England by the name of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. And I’m seeing at the Book Fair, the Shavua Hasefer, everyone’s buying Sacks, in Hebrew, and in Steimatsky, and in Tzomet Sefarim, all these bookstores they have Sacks right front and center. And, and I was like, where did this come from? And all these young couples are studying Sacks, Saturday afternoon, Shabbat.

So I started to look into it and I actually found articles from when the first Sacks book was translated into Hebrew where someone wrote, Hatragediah shel HaRav Sacks, the tragedy of Rabbi Sacks. What was the tragedy? He’s so interesting and he’s so integrationist and synthetic and just what Israel needs, and Israelis will never like him because it, it goes so against the Israeli sort of religious binary.

And here we are 12 years later, about, and Sacks has exploded. And so I think that’s a measure of, of the success, the fact that there’s this huge readership that—it’s also Koren Publishers got Haggai Erlich is an amazing translator. They did a great job of promotion. Of course there are all sorts of factors, but there’s this readership in Israel, this moderate group. Some of them observant, some of them non-Observant, a lot of them datlashim people who came from observant homes and are very allegiant to tradition, but not necessarily observant of tradition. 

And Sacks speaks to them in ways that Rav Cook doesn’t speak to them, in ways that all the people they heard about in Bnei Akiva don’t speak to them. So that would be an interesting example of success.

If I may, one piece, which I assume we’d get to, so I’ll just bring it in here, which is, many people when they read my book or when they talk to me, will say to me, yeah, but look at politics. Look at the political sphere, you know? Moderate? Come on. So, you know, you have Bougie Herzog, President, Yitzchak Herzog, who wasn’t so successful as a politician. He’s a great president, I think. You have Naftali Bennett, who’s a child of immigrants, but for the most part, you know, these are like odd men out, and there’s a lot of truth to that and, and part of what my book is saying is actually two things.

One is that, stop just reading the relationship between Diaspora Jewry or World Jewry and Israeli Jewry through the lens of politics. I’m not saying politics aren’t important, but it’s richer than that. Israeli society is richer, Judaism is richer, and if we look beyond that, we actually see a lot of framings of grassroots engagement. The other part is a piece that is, I think some people would call it failure, some people call it success, and I’d be interested in what you think, Yehuda, which is that these people who are, I describe them as moderate when it comes to women, when it comes to academics, when it comes to relationship with Jews of the spectrum of, when it comes to denominations, all sorts of issues that I talk about in the book.

When it comes to politics, when it comes to the Gaza War, when it comes to issues of Israeli self defense, they’re certainly generally not the, you know, the most extreme or you know, they sort of gravitate toward the Israeli center. But the Israeli center is much more nationalist and is much more defensive. And for American Jews who are very focused on a certain type of liberal worldview, and tikkun olam as being a central foundation of what it means to be a Jew, those things are very challenging. It’s really a shidduch, a combination that I think a lot of people have trouble getting their head around, and I’d love to talk about it, because I think it’s an important one. 

Yehuda: Look, I mean, both Lichtenstein and Hartman took a rightward turn after the Second Intifada. In both cases, both of them had been pro-peace process, pro-negotiation, pro-Oslo, when I was in Gush with Lichtenstein. and I was there ’94 to ’96, which were the the Oslo years, and he was very open about his support for the Oslo process. He even said at times, if it comes to it, for the future of the state of Israel, we need to give back Gush Etzion, which nobody ever believed was going to happen and definitely won’t happen in the future. We will move the yeshiva to Jerusalem. He was living in Jerusalem and commuting at the time. After the Second Intifada, he moved out there. And Hartman too, after the Second Intifada wrote some things that really ruptured some of his relationship with Western intellectuals, because of the degree of anger that he had. 

And I agree with you that there’s… some of what you’re describing is like a decoupling. Of moderate religious values from very clear types of liberal politics and how they’re gonna show up and, and it’s like, well, if you live in this society, your moderate orientations can only lead you so far in terms of political expressions, whereas if you live in a totally different environment, you can actually map your moderate religious worldviews exactly onto moderate politics. 

I think you’re descriptively correct. I think it is frustrating for those of us who are trying to heal the breach between these two societies, because American Jews do locate the center of gravity in terms of their relationship to Israel based on politics. Partly we do that because politics really do matter in Israel and for Israelis, they’re also the center of gravity. So it becomes a little bit frustrating to say, look, you should see how much kinship you have ideologically from one place to the other, but that kinship only shows up on issues of quote unquote, “religious significance.” It doesn’t show up in a place where it seems to matter more, which is in, in the actual major issues around democracy, occupation, and so forth, which seem to be defining the future of Israel. 

Adam: Yehuda. I’m not trying to pick, but I don’t like, I, I’m not gonna use the term kinship. I’m going to use the term chavruta, conversational partners. I think that there’s clearly lots of compromise or distinctions or awareness of differences, and that’s why I put it out there. I think that there is a frustration, but I think when the frustration is a sense that we are completely in different spheres, and that it filters down to every aspect of who, who we are, then there is no conversation.

I agree with you. How come people in America, who I really respect academically, intellectually, spiritually, have a difficult time appreciating certain aspects of Israeli national identity or Israeli defensive strategy, however you wanna describe it, or settlement, et cetera? I need to ask that question.

I think as someone living on, on the other side of the pond, I would ask, how come there are people who I share so much with on these same types of issues and they are completely, you know, unambivalent about serving in the army in certain context or you know, Yossi Hershkowitz, who is mentioned in the book, or, you know, and that’s why people who I mentioned at the end of the book, Jon Polin and Hersh Goldberg Polin, Rachel, the, the parents of this poor young man, such a sweet soul who was murdered in captivity in Gaza. These are people who everyone is learning that there’s so much in common with them, but yet their children do go out to the army and they—I don’t know their politics, but they’re, you know, they’re certainly different than American, kind of more progressive liberals. That’s the piece.

I, I do wanna tell a little story about Lichtenstein, which is interesting. My first encounter with him was just like yours, Yehuda. I was in a gap year at a yeshiva called Beit Midrash Hatorah, my first year, BMT. And my friends, older friends who had gone to college already told me there’s this great rabbi coming to speak. And this was September, 1982, which is a week after Sabra and Shatila. A week after this terrible massacre that Israel kind of let happen in a terrible way. Waltz with Bashir, et cetera.

So, this great rabbi gets up and he says, al chet shechatanu lefanecha b-chozek yad. It’s from the pronouncements that we make on Yom Kippur, et cetera, the sin that we have made of being too strong handed, meaning being too aggression oriented. And this is a, a head of a Hesder yeshiva who sends his students, his children to the army. And that was a very complex message. 

So I think that the people that one can speak to are not people we agree with, but they are people who are conscious and sensitive to the complexity of that mix and are willing to share and talk about it and not to be coercive about it or to be saying, I have nothing to talk to you about. 

Yehuda: Right. On the contrary, I mean, although even in your example, completely unimaginable in any religious Zionist context about anything during the Gaza War. Completely unimaginable that you could get away with saying, this terrible thing happened under our watch, we take that kind of ownership and responsibility. And I know all of the reasons why the analogies are not the same. I know all of that, but that’s, I guess what I’m also addressing, which is what you call the pushback before, is also there’s a very significant kind of rising illiberalism, which continues to paint any of that stuff as being—that’s not Zionist, it’s not Jewish. 

And I, listen, I’m, I’m drawn into so much of what you’re describing. I felt like reading the book made sense of a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about and I, like you, recognized my own. Not just place in the story as an actor, but also my own humanity in the story. I’ve watched this play out. It’s also the same thing I’ve argued to many American Jews for a long time, which is, look for the ways in which liberal ideas can win in Israel, even if it doesn’t look like the expressions that you would choose.

But we are facing a pretty significant tidal wave against some of the manifestation of these ideas in terms of Israeli religious and political life. It’s not gonna—alone, we are not gonna bridge the gap or even create a chavruta between Israelis and American Jews until we even are willing to tackle some of that. 

Adam: So I would ask you a question sort of as a way of responding, which I really appreciate what you’re saying and I, so you don’t wanna have like a zero sum discussion of, Adam saying, you know, my son-in-law was hardly home when my daughter was pregnant because he did 350 days of reserve duty and he’s a lawyer by training and he was supposed to be in his office in Jerusalem, but instead he was, you know? And when I said to my, my daughter, how’s my son-in-law doing now that the war is sort of… the ceasefire took place and he’s back in the office, she said to me, he’s doing much better. And I said, how come? 

And she said, well, when they went in in October of 2023, what they told them was, we’re going in to bring the hostages back. And every time he’d be called again and again and again for reserve duty, they’d say, we’re going to get the hostage back. And every time he’d come home, we’d say, we didn’t get the hostages back. We didn’t get the hostages back. And then he came home and the hostages were coming home. And he said, well, it’s not perfect. But we actually got as many as we could back. We made mistakes. 

When I say that to you, you get it, but I’m not saying it to say, well that excuses all mistakes, but it’s a way of saying what you said and I quoted it in the book, ’cause I thought it was so appropriate, that there’s a sense of, not parallel existences, but perpendicular existences. A sense of meeting points, but meeting points from different experiences and a different sense of the existential concern. 

You know, when I talk to my Israeli students, you know, and I talk about things like antisemitism growing in America, I talk to them about the nature of Jewish life in America, and I work very hard, among other things, to explain to them that the word dati doesn’t work the way it does in Israel. Because there are many people who are dati who are Reform, who are Reconstructionists, who are post-denominational, and they are dati, they’re religious. And they have to understand that. But similarly on antisemitism to be appreciative, to understand that it’s different circumstances.

So again, I’m not trying to be apologetic, I’m just trying to see how that kind of perpendicular meeting point is not one of a crash, but rather of, well, at that meeting point, if we are aware of that, are there subjects that sometimes I feel, as an Israeli, where it’s just shut down, oh, you know, you’re an occupationist, or your kids serve in the army, or you served in the army, you know, you’re, I can’t talk to you. Like, that’s the end. 

But, and in the same way, I don’t wanna do that with people in America or anywhere in Israel who have very strongly antagonistic opinions on these things. So I think that certainly Hartman is along those lines. But I used to think those things were more obvious than they are. There’s a lot of divide and it’s very sad. Sad for me. And yes, I’m an academic, but if this book helps a little bit in making people rethink that, I’m really happy. I care about these things. They matter to me. 

Yehuda: Beautifully said. Thank you, Adam. Thanks for coming on the show today. 

Adam: Thank you, Yehuda. And, and thank you for all you’re doing.